It's been discussed before, but I never bothered to look into that,
since I didn't think I cared :)
Now, a friend of mine took the time to (more or less) manually recompile/
repackage/reinstall his Debian GNU/Linux woody box.
His word was "it WAY faster!". No numbers, just those three words. Got'a
mean something...
If I remember correctly from the last time I saw this subject come up,
the resolution was "no, we don't want that". I can't remember why, but
I don't care (unless it's changed :).

Ok, I have actually done a little test program. The problem is that
optimizing an application with gcc 3.3 might actually make things
*slower*. I have a P4 (2.6GHz) and an K7 2000+ workstation. When I run a
simple program that only does,

When I run the program with no optimization -O0, I got some numbers that
looked about the same for both machines. Then I compiled with
-march=pentium-4 and -march=athlon-xp and -O6, and surprise, surprise,
the P4 had a speed *decrease*!! It slowed down from something like 23
seconds to 25 seconds. I don't know the exact numbers right now since
this was about a month ago, but optimizing things for P4 using gcc is
not the best thing. It is much better to just least things with i386 or
i486, and just use -O6 or whatever. There is a reason why linux uses
assembly for speed critical parts of the kernel!

If someone wants, I can post some numbers from a simple test like above
tomorrow.

- Adam

PS. I know for a fact that optimizing things with SSE or SSE2 *slows
down* the program if compiled with gcc. This happed for both Athlon and
P4 when I tried to optimize a loop-heavy magic square program.

Optimizing things with the Intel's C++ compiler might produce
drastically different results, but that is not the point here :)